The 5 benefits of Positive Psychology

A review of the main benefits of Positive Psychology, a booming discipline.

Until not so long ago, psychology was assumed to be a scientific field aimed at correcting what is wrong. Thus, it was practically an extension of health disciplines, especially psychiatry and neurology, and of strategies for "correcting" children's behavior.

However, the development of this discipline gradually showed that that this conception of psychology as "fixing what is broken" was extremely limited (and stigmatizing). (Why settle for using what we are learning about the human mind only to help those who are considered to be in a bad situation compared to others? Why can't we use this knowledge not only to lose less, but to gain more?

Positive Psychology has its raison d'être in these two questionsIt aims to help us change to get closer to the way we would like to be in order to promote the most ambitious personal or professional projects of our lives. In this article we will see which are its benefits and the way in which it contributes to the personal development.

The main benefits of Positive Psychology

Positive Psychology is based on the philosophical current of humanism, which points out that subjective experiences, what we feel and cannot express in words, can have as much or more value than our observable behavior. For this reason, psychologists working from this paradigm seek to achieve effects that go beyond the objective, and that connects with people's motivations and real needs and concerns..

Let's see a brief summary about the benefits of Positive Psychology and how it brings us closer to this kind of goals related to the emotional and what is really meaningful for our lives.

1. It makes us improve in the regulation of emotions.

Positive Psychology understands that what we feel is not the direct result of what happens around us, but of how we interpret and perceive what happens around us. That is why it is important to know how to manage our emotions, given that in many occasions an inadequate regulation of these emotions makes us see problems where there are none..

Anger, for example, is capable of making us sacrifice many things in order to do something that not only does not bring us any benefit, but also harms us more than we were when we started to feel that way.

With this objective in mind, psychologists based on the Positive Psychology paradigm train people to be able to adjust their emotions in the best possible way. train people to be able to adjust their emotions in the best possible way and make them work for them, not against them. and make them play in their favor, and not against them. After all, if our emotional side exists it is because most of the time it is useful to us to a greater or lesser extent, although there are always cases in which this is not the case and it is worth learning to minimize its harmful effects.

It is not a matter of suppressing them, but of making sure that some emotional states do not eclipse the influence of others that should have a modulating role over the former.

2. Helps us to have a realistic self-concept

The self-concept is the set of beliefs about oneself that constitutes everything we know about who we are. Depending on how it is, we will feel more or less capable of performing certain tasks. or to be well integrated in a certain social circle.

Positive Psychology helps us to have a self-concept that adjusts to our real abilities and qualities and to our capacity to improve in certain tasks, and this translates into a good self-esteem.

It does this by putting our apparent failures into perspective and showing us the way in which a good part of its existence is due to elements of our environment that we could not control, but that we can choose how they affect us.

3. It gives guidelines to initiate projects and transform habits.

Starting a new project requires getting out of our comfort zone. That is to say, to assume a certain degree of discomfort that will come at the beginning, but that with time will fade away as we see the fruits of our efforts (fruits that we would not have reached if we had not made the effort to get out of the routine).

Thus, Positive Psychology immerses us in dynamics that force us to take control of our lives and not let limiting beliefs restrict us. not to let limiting beliefs restrict our true freedom..

4. It allows us to develop leadership

Not everyone can be a leader 24 hours a day, but we all have the ability to lead groups in certain contexts and types of work.

As Positive Psychology does not only focus on the individual but also takes into account the social element of leadership. takes into account the social element of psychologyIt gives us the tools to adopt a leadership style that suits us in a certain facet of our lives, whether it is personal or professional.

5. It invites us to develop our own philosophy of life

As we have seen so far, the benefits of Positive Psychology have to do with the empowerment of people: allowing them to be people who make important decisions and who know how to assume their consequences in the most constructive way possible.

Therefore, a derivative effect of all this is that thanks to these dynamics we generate our own philosophy of life, a chain of principles and values that allows us to give meaning to what we experience, instead of simply following the same principles and values.instead of just following the ideas of others who have never been in our situation.